JOHN THE
OBSCURE ™
By John Ruch
©
2007
Toy
Story: Back-of-the-Box Mythologies of Commercial Playtime
Commercial toys display a remarkably
uniform aversion to letting kids use their own imaginations.
Virtually every significant toy in a
modern shopping mall toy store comes with a prefab backstory.
The vast majority of them are tied into pre-existing media like TV shows,
movies and comic books. On my recent visit to one such store, at least 20
percent of the core shelf space was devoted to “Pirates of the Caribbean”
material.1
Those without such ties typically
have a literal backstory—a back-of-the-box mythology
spelled out in some detail and often elaborated on a Web site.
The commercial purpose of such backstories is pretty obvious: by imposing a storyline, the
toymakers also impose a requirement to buy a complete collection for that story
to be play-acted completely. Also, by creating a common mythos, the makers
create peer pressure by turning ownership of specific toys into cultural norms.
Of course, that doesn’t necessarily
mean the backstories aren’t fun. I decided to compile
some of them, mostly to see if any of them were funny. But it also gave me a
picture of an unsurprisingly evil gestalt.
Here are the products and their
zeitgeists:
Lego Exo-Force
In Lego’s bizarre answer to anime,
four humans clad in exoskeletal armor battle robots
on Sentai Mountain, a peak that is literally split in
two, with each side occupying a half. The robots were created by the humans and
used to live in peace with “the ancient way of life,” but then they undertook
what essentially was a slave rebellion. The leader of the humans, Sensei Keiken, created the robot that is now the evil leader Meca One. (No offense to Muslims intended, I presume.)
Lego Bionicles
This toy line, currently about
undersea warfare, actually has a specific backstory
Web site.2 But it’s so bizarre and skimpy,
it doesn’t really clarify matters. Essentially, there are two tribes, the
“brave” Toa and the evil Barraki, a.k.a. “Creeps of
the Deep” and “evil rulers of the black waters.” The six Toa are some sort of
elemental heroes based on an island, presumably with quasi-Polynesian
overtones.3 The Barraki are basically
fish-headed Lego blocks that look like a can of well-rotted sardines. It’s
unclear if kids are supposed to imagine them as organic or robotic. In any
case, a mask known as the “Mask of Life” has fallen into the Barraki’s hands and apparently will allow them to escape
from the bottom of the sea to commit some kind of evil. The Toa must “wage a
war beneath the waves” to prevent this.
Imaginext
Dinosaurs
“Imagine…a primitive civilization of
humans and dinosaurs, living in a lush, green land. One side—the predators—are
[sic] using up its natural resources, wiping out everything and everyone that
gets in their [sic] way. The other side—the ecovores—want
[sic] to preserve their [sic] land. And they’re willing to fight to make that
happen. Will the predators succeed in destroying the land, causing their own
extinction? Or will the ecovores stop the destruction
and make the land a place where dinosaurs and humans can live together
peacefully? In the world of Imaginext, anything is
possible!”
This hilarious
Creationism-meets-Greenpeace backstory is the one
that inspired this column. I love the unintentional implication that in the
world of Imaginext, it’s entirely possible that evil
and utter destruction may prevail. And wouldn’t an “ecovore”
be far more destructive than a normal “predator”?
Story aside, the Dinosaurs packaging
had another great claim: “It moves, it roars, like a real dinosaur!” Do they
know something we don’t?
Incidentally, this product line
includes not only dinosaurs but also a mammoth that pulls a sloth in a wooden
cart.
Dino Valley: Escape from
Primal Danger
In this “Jurassic Park” rip-off, an
earthquake, apparently in Africa, opens the “Gates of Dino Valley,” wherein
dinosaurs have survived the aeons in hiding. The
beasts escape. “And there to hunt them is the evil scientist Dr. Skinnybones McButt and his wicked
helpers Max Warthog and Dirty Dan Dee.” King Zulu, whose society has known
about Dino Valley for 10,000 years but kept it secret, seeks to drive off the
villains. He’s assisted by WARS, the Wild Animal Rescue Squad, manned by Chief
Running Bear and Alex Aqua.
Dr. McButt,
incidentally, is fat.
Ponyville
This is little more than a loose
conceptual fantasy world for the My Little Pony toys. We’re told that lead pony
Sunny Daze explores Ponyville daily.
The absolute best current My Little
Pony product is the Crystal Rainbow Bedroom, featuring a canopy bed wherein a
pony can sleep, complete with plush eyemask.
Barbie Fairytopia
These winged Barbie dolls also
inhabit a loose conceptual world in which they learn the “Magic of the Rainbow”
at “Fairy School.” It must be acknowledged that this world now has multimedia
support, including a direct-to-video movie and one of those horrifying Z-grade
stage shows.4
Girls Raise Children for Boys
to Kill
In terms of toys that beg a certain
degree of roleplaying and storytelling, these were
the absolutely only products I could find in the entire store that weren’t
derived directly from pre-existing media. The consumerist training and lack of
independent thinking are staggering in retrospect. It’s as though childhood’s
wonder was created solely as a goldmine to give Disney, Johnny Depp and DC Comics another nickel.
In terms of backstories,
media-derived toys all follow the same sorts of storytelling patterns as those
above. Which is to say: war for boys, socializing for girls.
I had no desire to repeat what so
many cultural critics have said so well about mainstream toys. But if you
actually walk into a toy store, the obviousness of the evil is as shocking as
finding a segregated water fountain. It’s hard to not talk about.
Segregation is the key word. The
worlds of girls and boys are presented as utterly distinct and physically
separate. In those most hardcore dichotomies of doll-action figure and houseware-guns, the girls’ and boys’ toy sections were on
the extreme opposite sides of the store.5
The boy toys are virtually all about
war. And not just any kind of war, but Manichean war between extreme goodness
and extreme badness, simplistically defined. The combatants are often suggested
to be racially different, or at least occupying places
foreign to each other. Exo-Force has really
unpleasant connotations of a slave rebellion as viewed by plantation owners.
The answer to any sort of problem or tension is murderous, mechanized violence.
And while that message is simple, it’s usually delivered in a highly detailed
storyline that suggests a fascistic, almost obsessive urge to control the boy
imagination. The overtones of environmentalism in some of the tales were
interesting modern touches, if also puzzling when one considers how thoroughly
war and military build-up wreck nature everywhere.
The girl toys are virtually all
about raising babies and keeping house. It’s as though building a mall toy
store creates a time portal back to 1950. In terms of the toys above, the girl
world is superficially a lot more healthy, with the
focus on socializing—the pony wandering around town, the fairies going to
school. It’s also a far less regimented, open-ended world—part of the reason I
always felt girls had it better than boys, who invariably got stuck with
lantern-jawed, lantern-brained clods as heroes.
However, these toys also focus girls
on being delicate, weak and shopping-obsessed. My Little Pony is about endless
accessorizing. There’s almost no point in flogging Barbie any further, but
again, actually examining the product line renews the shock like seeing a black
lawn jockey. The Barbie Web site, on which Barbie is voiced by someone who sounds
at least 25, has a section devoted to teaching girls how to shop for worthless,
overpriced mall clothes.6 (It also emits a creepy wolf whistle when
you put your mouse over a mirror in her walk-in closet.) There are also those
criticisms of Barbie as anorexic. She looks more like the product of a
five-star mortician’s free make-up job at Auschwitz, or possibly a stickbug gone to clown school. A ladle of boiling lead in
the ear would do less harm to a child’s brain than this evil crap.
Of course, kids bring their own
imaginations to the table anyway. I used to play with the extremely dualistic
G.I. Joe toys and followed most of their rules—but I also used to tuck them
into bed at night in their cozy little war machines, using Kleenexes as
blankets, and generally played out avant-garde soap operas with them.
It’s when the kids become
adults—i.e., more rigid and a lot dumber—that these toy mythologies become
worrisome. An incredible number of people take literally the idea that evil is
only something deliberate and scheming, when in fact it’s often unintentional,
a lack of self-awareness or bravery. In a weirdo endless feedback loop, it’s
why they can let their kids play with some of this vile junk—parents think they
can’t do any evil unless they intend to. And so it goes on.
Toys are easily dismissed as
fantasy—when stodgy adults don’t want to engage in introspection about them—but
they’re clearly used to inculcate a particular (and particularly warped)
consensus reality. Sales of G.I. Joe products and toy guns spiked after the
Sept. 11 attacks.7 There’s a quasi-famous Ohio National Guardsman
and Iraq veteran who legally renamed himself Optimus
Prime after the leader of the “good” side in the extremely dualistic backstory of the Transformers war toys.8 The selling
of the actual Iraq War makes G.I. Joe look complex and makes one wonder what
toys G.W. played with.
Among the many facts lost in the
brouhaha over former Harvard University president Lawrence Summers’ claim that
women’s brains might be inherently bad at math and science was that he rooted
the idea in toys. He told the Associated Press that he had given his daughter
toy trucks—“male” toys—but that she had called them “daddy” and “baby.” This
suggested to him that social gender distinctions are somehow biologically
inherent.9 This proves, of course, that
Lawrence Summers is one of the world’s biggest idiots, undeserving of a
community college diploma, let alone leadership of one of the world’s great
research institutions. He was indeed driven out for this and many other reasons
by the actual smart people of Harvard. But in the outside world, he was largely
lauded as a victim of “political correctness” (correctness apparently being a
sin to many), and it’s easy to see why. Most people literally, instinctively
believe that sexism is right, and the false segregation of the toy store is
where it all begins, for them and for Summers.
How many of us act out our lives
from the script on the back of a box? And who’s the real toy?
1
KB Toys, CambridgeSide Galleria, Cambridge,
Massachusetts, Feb. 3, 2007. Incidentally, I paid for my use of the store by
purchasing a Godzilla “Pack of Destruction” toy set, whose box informs me that
Godzilla possesses “over 98% universal awareness!”
3 http://actionfigures.about.com/library/arc/blfftoa.htm
4 “Barbie: Fairytopia”
(2005) and the ongoing “Barbie Live in Fairytopia,”
respectively.
5 It must be noted that the mainstream toy
store is dying. There are only a couple left in the core Boston-Cambridge area.
Toy retailing has generally moved to all-purpose big-box stores, which
generally retain the same segregation. However, Web sales are obviously a huge
and growing segment, and a sales method that doesn’t involve shelves. It might
be interesting to follow if and how such distinctions are retained online.
6 http://barbie.everythinggirl.com.
7 http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0112/09/sm.18.html
and www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/Strombecker-Corporation-Company-History.html.
8 “National Guardsman Changed His Name to a
Toy” by Vic Gideon, March 19, 2003, WKYC-TV, Cleveland, Ohio, at http://www.wkyc.com/news/news_fullstory.asp?id=3828.
9 The media rushed to clarify that Summers’ claim was only speculative, while also rushing to
bury this sort of detail he expressed about his reason for bringing up the
topic in the first place. It was all expressive of a secret belief in the media
that women are inferior. I wrote to Summers about his
course of thought at the time; he did not respond. (He later issued a general
“apology” of the non-apologetic sort so widely issued by politicians,
celebrities, sports figures, etc., these days, and inexplicably accepted as
actual contrition by the media.) For the record, here’s the letter:
Dear President Summers:
I just read your fascinating
comments to the Boston Globe and a related Associated Press report regarding
what you find provocative evidence of a possible innate difference between the
sexes: namely, that you provided male-stereotyped toys to your daughter, who
then referred to them as “daddy” and “baby.” This, you explained, was your
personal basis for lending seriousness to claims that biological determinism is
at the root of women’s unequal success in science and math careers. (An
explanation that belies your backpedaling statement released later in the day.)
I would have presumed you, as
the head of great research university, would understand the main concern with
self-reported information: people are often doing the exact opposite of what
they believe or intend. Specifically, studies of self-reported “gender-neutral”
upbringing typically show the family members actually enacting gender
stereotypes in a myriad ways. The fact that you provided toys that were not
gender-neutral, but rather a deliberate inversion of gender stereotypes,
suggests you transmit a strong awareness of such stereotypes at home, whether
you intend to or not. (And of course, children are barraged with gender-role
information by society at large incessantly.) Furthermore, it is unclear
in what way referring to toy trucks as “daddy” and “baby” is peculiarly
feminine, let alone biologically innate—because surely even you would agree,
Mr. President, the English language is not biologically determined. On top of
all this, it is completely unclear how any of this would support even a
hypothesis of biological determinism behind women's careers in science and
math.
You also, incredibly, suggest
that biological determinism hasn’t been studied; that a belief in sexism as a
factor is somehow wishful thinking or sheer bias; and that you are merely a
wise neutral observer calling for further study. You speak as if of an entirely
new theory. You neglect to mention that your comments have a very long
historical context as elements of deliberately sexist thought. You are also
apparently ignorant of decades of research that have failed to find women’s
brains inferior at anything. The “spirit of academic inquiry” you brandish in
your not-an-apology statement has already inquired, Mr. President, long and
hard. Its results are there for you to see if you’d look.
If you find this such a
provocative field of research, why haven’t you consulted your own faculty? Harvard’s late, lamented Stephen Jay Gould wrote a fine book on the
topic of biological determinism, “The Mismeasure of
Man.” I daresay it’s in your school’s library.
Even more importantly, what
are you doing as president of the world's greatest university when you clearly
lack basic critical thinking skills and a fundamental understanding of
scientific evidence? Did you really, as the Associated Press report states,
trade in being “provocative” for being accurate? Did “daddy truck” and “baby
truck” really persuade you of the possible validity of a biological determinism
hypothesis? Do you expect your not-an-apology statement to fool us, or
yourself? Do you wish Harvard students to learn that it is better—because
easier—to characterize one’s comments as “misconstrued” rather than getting an
education they sorely need?
For the sake of your
intriguing hypothesis of biological determinism, are you willing to study
whether you became Harvard’s president simply because you’re male? The evidence
for that, at least, is increasingly persuasive.
Significant
sources not cited in the text or footnotes include: http://exoforce.lego.com/en-US/default.aspx (Lego “Exo-Force” site); www.bionicle.com (Lego “Bionicle” site); www.hasbro.com/mylittlepony
(Hasbro’s My Little Pony site); www.imaginext.com; www.imdb.com (Internet Movie
Database). Posted Feb. 4, 2007.